Ever since our visit to Boxerwood Gardens in Lexington, Virginia, my kids have been begging me for a mud kitchen. They spent hours there making mud pies with mud and gravel, salads with grass and flowers, and mud milkshakes. Plus, Pinterest is full of inspiring mud kitchen ideas. Follow Cindy Young | One Part Sunshine’s board inspiration {outdoor play space} on Pinterest.So I have begun the planning phase of putting a mud kitchen in our yard.
My son chose a location in our vegetable garden, which I think is perfect because my toddler can play while I work in the garden. The garden already has a wooden house-like structure in it that may have been for storing garden tools. We are going to use this structure as the “restaurant” with the actual mud kitchen set up next to it.
The mud kitchen will consist of a sink, some shelving and a counter space. We stopped by the Habitat Store and picked up a great stainless steel kitchen sink for $5! I’m trying to figure out whether to build a simple wooden stand for the sink and to try to find an old wooden table and cut a whole out for it. More on that to come.
We also discovered a great chandelier for $10 at the Habitat Store. I’m going to remove the electrical parts of it and use solar candles instead. I’m also planning to paint the chandelier and hang crystals from it for a little extra excitement.
Of course, we are going to dress things up with some flowers, a table and chairs. I’m going to run a hose out to the kitchen and possibly hook it up to some sort of faucet using this tutorial. But in the meantime we will just fill up some buckets with water for the kids to use to make mud and to rinse off.
I have an old turtle sandbox that I am going to use to store our dirt for making mud. The sandbox has a cover on it so we can keep the dirt dry (just in case they need chocolate crumbles for their mud pies).
Stay tuned for more on the mud kitchen! Hopefully it will be done in the next couple of weeks.
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